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VIDEO:  https://video.foxnews.com/v/6022639026001/

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{ thefederalist.com } ~ As the North Atlantic Treaty Organization turns 70, most of the commentary is focused on the same old tripe... In the Washington Post, diplomat Nick Burns wrote one of the most cliched screeds, titled “NATO’s biggest problem is Trump.” One could imagine where it was going merely from the headline. Apparently, NATO leaders say Trump is a problem. Well, of course—Trump has been the first one to actually pressure free-riders to pay for their own defense. Who in his right mind would like that his buck passing is over? The article also says Trump was weak to Russia, and must do more to uphold the liberal international order. It did not mention that the current U.S. administration has provided lethal weapons to Ukraine, while Germany continued to cut down on defense spending and invite the Russian energy sector into the European Union. The rest of the commentariat on NATO and Trump are also absolutely predictable. Unfortunately, none of their articles are mentioning anything about the biggest issue facing NATO. It’s not Trump, it’s Turkey. The Turkish husband of a French colleague of mine was arrested in the purge that followed a failed Turkish coup attempt. He has a doctorate, is a senior  police officer, is secular and liberal in his outlook, and, of course, is still rotting in jail. The coup itself was dodgy, and Turkish leader Recep Erdogan, Europe’s longest-serving, democratically elected Islamist, immediately blamed a cleric named Fethullah Gulen, who is funnily enough based in the United States...   https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/05/turkey-natos-biggest-problem-not-trump/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=4b5bbef929-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-4b5bbef929-83771801  

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{ foreignaffairs.com } ~ In March of 1969, Chinese troops ambushed and killed a Soviet border patrol on an island near the Chinese-Russian border... Fighting on and near the island lasted for months and ended with hundreds of casualties. Fifty years later, the ferocity of the skirmish between Mao Zedong’s China and Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union seems to belong to a very distant past—so distant, indeed, that many foreign-policy  experts are convinced that an anti-U.S. alliance between the two countries is  emerging. Yet even half a century on, such an assessment stretches the evidence beyond what it can bear. On closer inspection, Chinese-Russian economic, foreign policy, and military cooperation is less than impressive. The history of relations between the two countries is fraught, and they play vastly different roles in the world economy, making a divergence in their objectives all but unavoidable. In short, reports of a Russian-Chinese alliance have been greatly exaggerated. Economic relations between Russia and China are rapidly expanding, and some experts have cited these ties as evidence of a growing closeness between the two countries. Indeed, just last year, bilateral trade increased by at least 15 percent compared to 2017 and reached a record $100 billion. Yet asymmetries in the scale and structure of bilateral commerce suggest caution: although China is Russia’s second-largest trading partner (after the EU) and Russia’s largest individual partner in both exports and imports, for China the Russian market is at best second-rate. Russia ranks tenth in Chinese exports and does not make it into the top ten in either imports or total trade. The structure of the trade is similarly skewed. More than three-quarters of Russia’s exports to China are raw materials, specifically crude oil, wood, and coal. China’s sales to Russia are 45 percent consumer goods and 38 percent electronics and machinery. The completion this year of the Power of Siberia natural gas pipeline will further widen the disparity by facilitating the export of $400 billion worth of Russian raw materials to China over the next 30 years. The nature of this exchange corresponds quite closely to Karl Marx’s and Vladimir Lenin’s description of colonial trade, in which one country becomes a raw material appendage of another. It is rare for metropolises to ally themselves with their colonies. Russia’s and China’s efforts at joint economic development and investment do not look much like cooperation between two eager allies. Even after Moscow’s so-called pivot to the east, spurred by post-Crimea sanctions, from 2014 through 2018 China directly invested no more than $24 billion into its northern neighbor’s economy. During the same period, China invested $148 billion in sub-Saharan Africa including $31 billion in Nigeria alone, and $88 billion in South America including $34 billion just in Brazil...